Fallout 3’s at its best during your first trip into the war-torn ruins of downtown DC. Rather than an open and desolate expanse, you’re navigating tight underground passageways by Pip-Boy light, occasionally emerging into the daylight to fight through patches of ruined city often littered with battered landmarks. Bethesda had initially envisioned this urban jungle to be even more of an expansive labyrinth, and a group of modders have now had a crack at resurrecting the cut areas to create their own version of that more expansive DC.
The creation of the group – who go by the DC Anniversary Project team – dropped over the festive period. It’s called ‘Fallout 3 Anniversary – District of Columbia’ and principally adds back in 13 areas Bethesda elected to pull the plug on when they ditched an initial plan for Fallout 3’s DC area to be made up of 26 neighbourhoods – as outlined in this lengthy video on the game’s cut content which the modders have handily linked.
“While very little remains of the actual exterior areas of these missing worldspaces, there is just enough cut content and information left over in the final game to piece together what was cut, where they were, and, in some cases, what dungeons they might have originally had within them,” the modders wrote, also noting that some bits of these cut areas were repurposed by Bethesda as locations in the wasteland outside of downtown DC itself.
So, having reached out to Fallout 3 level designer Jesse Tucker and drawn inspiration from Adam Adamowicz’s concept art for the game, the group have had a go at revamping and rejigging the DC ruins into “a labyrinthian maze of unique worldspaces that try to stay true not only to what the Fallout 3 developers might have originally made, but also to the urban and suburban environments of real-life DC and Virginia that these cut worlds were based on.” In the process, they say they’ve more than doubled the area’s size and moved around an entire article’s worth of vanilla locations like Arlington Library and Temple of the Union compound to fit that reimagining.
As for the 13 resurrected areas, five are categorised by the modders as belonging to the District of Columbia, while eight are classed as part of Virginia. Taking the revamped network of metro tunnel arteries to reach them, you’ll find the likes of cut NPCs and dungeons brought back alongside vanilla locations which’ve been moved. For example, there are buildings belonging to corps West Tek, Poseidon Energy, and Red Rocket to explore. Annandale Armory and Alexandria City Hall are a couple of other new interiors listed by the modders in another article and/or shown off in screenshots to have caught my eye.
As you might expect with a mod this ambitious, District of Columbia looks to have had a number of early bugs and teething issues its creators have had to work through. If you fancy giving it a go, there’s a version for regular Fallout 3, plus one designed to work with the Tale of Two Wastelands mod which allows you to travel between the Capital Wasteland and New Vegas’ Mojave. There aren’t any other hard requirements listed, through installation via Mod Organiser 2’s recommended and you’ll need to use either FO3LODGen or FNVLODGen to avoid pop-in.
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